What is the cost of following Christ? For Avvakum and many Russian believers, the cost was years of persecution and eventual martyrdom.
Avvakum (Habbakuk), the son of a priest and a godly mother, was born in 1621, and became a clergyman himself at the age of twenty-one. Throughout the 1640s he preached widely as part of a Russian renewal movement, known as the Bogoliubtsy or “Lovers of God.” He believed in the intervention of God in human affairs, expected spiritual gifts, and practiced exorcism, assured that at the name of Christ demons would flee.
In 1652 the church gave him the authority of an archpriest (a priest who exercises leadership over other priests within a region and sometimes acts in his bishop’s behalf). But that same year Nikon was named Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Nikon introduced a number of reforms.
To Avvakum and to many steeped in Russian Orthodox traditions, these changes were heretical. Here is how he described them in his autobiography as translated into English by Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees.
And they have planned with the devil to misprint books and falsify everything, and to alter the sign of the cross in the church, and on the wafers. Within the altar they have banished the priestly prayers, they have altered the “Lord have mercy upon us,” and in baptism they bid to invoke the Evil One. I would fain spit in his eyes and in theirs! And round about the font the Evil One leads them against the course of the sun, and in like fashion they consecrate the church, and when they solemnize marriage they lead the married widdershins [counter clockwise, rather than the traditional clockwise]; plainly they do this in hostility. And in baptism they do not abjure the Evil One. How should they? They are his children and they do not desire to abjure their father.
Pressured to go along with the Nikonian reforms, he refused, and was eventually banished wth his wife, children, and several other Old Believers (as they became known). Restored briefly, he was exiled again, making the dangerous two-year trek to Pustozersk where he arrived on 12 December 1667. This involved acute suffering for all of the exiles and death for many. But their lives also became conduits for God’s supernatural grace. Even Avvakum’s enemies and persecutors knew that if he prayed for them they would be healed.
The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself recounts many divine interventions. For instance, when Avvakum spoke out against brutality, he was flogged and chained overnight in a fall rain. Afterward he was flung naked into a pit. Despite the cold, he was able to write, “God kept me warm without clothes!”
His vivid account autobiography recounts many other miracles. Some hens, desperately needed for the eggs they produced, recovered when he prayed for them, sprinkled them with water he had blessed, and censed them with smoke. A child whose right hand and foot had withered was healed when the mother repented of her and asked for Avvakum’s intercession. Famously when the archpriest was desperate for water he
began to look up to heaven and to say,“O Lord, thou didst cause water to flow in the desert for the thirsty people of Israel, then and now art Thou; give me to drink by whatever means seem good to Thee . O Lord my God!… The ice gave a crack beneath me and split up to either side across the whole lake and came together again … and while this was going on I stood in my accustomed place and looking towards the east I bowed twice or thrice, pronouncing the name of the Lord in a loud voice from the depths of my heart. God had left me a small hole in the ice, and I, falling down, slaked my thirst. And I wept and was glad, praising God.
In light of that miracle he could write, “It is not the hunger for bread that destroys a man nor the thirst for water, but the great hunger of a man when he lives without praying to God.”
Another time he assured a cruel persecutor that if he sang the morning and evening office, God would give fair weather and corn would grow. “I spoke to him about the evening and morning office and he set to do this. God sent fair weather, and the corn ripened immediately. What a miracle! It was sown late but it ripened early.”
Near the end of his biography, he protested, “They think to establish the faith by fire or the knout and gallows-tree! Which of the apostles taught them that?”
He died in fire, burned alive in 1682 with three of his followers, testimony to the power of Christ in a heart. His frank and original autobiography transformed Russian literature, paving the way for a more realistic, more colloquial, and less formal style of writing.